Shop-Like - The Rogue-Like Item Shop Experience

Pretty much all random chance and guesswork

"Shop-Like: The Rogue-Like Item Shop Experience" is a unique blend of item shop management and roguelike elements, offering players endless replayability and diverse strategies to achieve success. The game centers around running a business to pay off debts, with the looming threat of debt slavery adding urgency to your entrepreneurial endeavors. Pros: - Diverse Play Styles: Whether you prefer mass-selling through vending machines or catering to individual customers by analyzing their unique traits, the game accommodates various approaches to maximize profits. - Dynamic Market Manipulation: Players can influence market prices by interacting with the media, allowing for strategic price adjustments to benefit their business. - Endless Replayability: With over 50 random upgrades, randomly generated customers, mid-game crises, and multiple difficulty levels, each playthrough offers a fresh and challenging experience. Cons: - Steep Learning Curve: The game's complexity may be overwhelming for newcomers, requiring time to fully grasp the mechanics and develop effective strategies. - Repetitive Elements: Some players might find certain tasks, such as customer interactions or item craftin…

I bought this game expecting to practice sales and tax evasion, and I instead got a stock market manipulation game. Great experience of buying low, selling high, and gambling money my character doesn't actually have.

Have been looking for a game like this for ages, just running the shop, no dungeon crawling, no crafting, just buy, sell, assassinate customers who are too good at haggling or too poor, become addicted to gambling, evade taxes, and pay off your loans. Also contains the single most realistic contract in video game history.

This is a tentative recommendation. For those raised in the era of flash games, I would rate this similarly to a very high quality flash game in terms "game feel". The systems function well enough to make the game enjoyable for a couple of hours and the different cities allow for a roguelite "ascension system". With all this said, the moment to moment gameplay feels somewhat samey and there are certain strategies that feel somewhat degenerate with the amount of money they can generate. Not a bad pick if you really enjoy shopkeep games or are just looking to kill a few hours.

It's fun, I completed it in around 10 hours. I needed to check a guide online to enjoy it. In particular, don't forget to use loans early, keep only customers with 4-5 wealth and unlock weapons tiers.